Aventurina King

A week and a half ago, I started going to the gym.  Everyday for one hour.  The exercise apparently still hasn’t sunken in.  No bulging calf muscles and my running endurance went from an all time low (10 minutes) to a not so low 15 minutes.

But more importantly, straight back from China, the gym crystallized my renewed impressions of America.  Women in tight pants and tops, men in baggy shorts and T-shirts tangle themselves up in monster machines.  A large portion bully themselves on the treadmill, staring fixedly, as though for vital moral support, at the glaring flat screen perched atop their buzzing scaffolding. 

The American gym is a microcosm of America’s worst.  Whereas sport brings people together (granted it’s around a piece of plastic polymer), gym adherents are alone with the machine (as I am now with my labtop) in their own bubble of self worship.  The machine becomes an extension of their ego, the bigger the better.  The effect is heightened by a strapped ipod, piping music that inexorably flattens thoughts to the level of the body: building muscle, losing fat.

As I sat on this beach-chair-like contraption, pushing a board attached to 40 pounds of weight with my two legs, I wondered whether there would have been another way to design these machines.  At the time I couldn’t think of any.  Right now, I have this image of one huge massive treadmill, or conversation of treadmills where people would have to face each other and speak while they are running.  The present positioning of the treadmill makes conversation uncomfortable.  Maybe the machines could be less intimidating.  Instead of black, weights could be rainbow colored.  The iron frame could itself lose weight to encourage vision and conversation.  Maybe the gym would just become one, huge flat gymnasium where people would sweat over exerting their own body weight.  Maybe I’m too optimistic.

I recently made it through two chapters of Edward Said’s “Orientalism.”   

It was far from an enjoyable read (imagine treading through a swamp of five syllable words and one paragraph long sentences), but it still got the wheels turning so much so that I brought up Orientalism at conversations during two recent social events (one engagement party, one birthday brunch).
Simply put, the book mercilessly critiques 19th century Western writings on “the oriental.”

Example: “The Arabian traveler is quite different from ourselves.  The labor of moving from place to place is a mere nuisance to him, he has no enjoyment in effort [as "we" do], and grumbles at hunger fatigue with all his might [as "we" do not].  You will never persuade the Oriental that, when you get off your camel, you can have any other wish than immediately to squat on a rug and take your rest, smoking and drinking.  Moreover the Arab is little impressed by scenery [but "we" are].” (Smith)

This racism can’t come as much of a surprise given the colonial agenda of the author’s nation.  What did surprise me though was the relevance of Orientalism to the present.  It seems that most of today’s journalism covering “the east” hasn’t evolved much from its 19th century counterpart.

Example, a recent NPR news story:

Aerobic, Not Erotic: China’s Latest Fitness Fad
In a downtown Beijing apartment, a half-dozen, mostly young women are gyrating and undulating in a room full of floor-to-ceiling metal poles and mirrors.
The women, who work white-collar jobs, are dressed in high boots, hot pants and tight tops. They swing, swoop, shimmy on up - and slide on down.
In China, newly affluent citizens are spending more time and money in search of a higher quality of life. They are quick to catch on to the latest foreign fitness fads, from yoga to bungee jumping and ballroom dancing to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And the women at this school are all practitioners of the latest fitness fad to sweep China: pole dancing. Here, the activity seems to have escaped connotations of strippers and girlie bars, and is seen as just another way to keep fit - exotic, perhaps, but not erotic.

(rest at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7119220)

Aside from some serious fact checking issues (6 women in a small apartment = latest fitness fad to sweep China = all the women in China) the article is pretty blatantly ridiculing it’s subject matter.  Wow, the entire population of Chinese women (not just the 6 students) actually think that pole-dancing is just an exercise, haven’t they got a lot to learn from us.  No superpower is happy to witness the birth of another and a lot of today’s ”China coverage” is a US defense mechanism against a constantly bruised ego (first Iraq, then China). 

I know it’s easy for me to point a finger.  The identification of a problem doesn’t become an obsession, it’s solving it that takes brain power.  How do you guard against writing biased articles on another country?  That’s one I’m still trying to figure out.  All help welcomed.

Excuse n. 1 : New words need New illustrations:

Once a week, I will go through my “intellectual” phase.  Those few hours in which every bible-length philosophy or molecular physics tome is like a pebble begging to be turned over (or a pigeon begging to be frightened into spreading its wings-although Parisian pigeons will not budge under any circumstance, you have to walk around them).

At this moment, I am thinking a lot about reading the History of Western Philosophy, but more so am asking myself a few questions:

1)Is the act of smiling to express happiness genetically inherited, or is it something that babies have to learn to do?

2)What of the act of crying?

Granted, the answers to these questions may be out there in some wikipedia entry.  But smiling’s fundamentality in human behavior points to it being transmitted genetically.  Smiling is the only way to shake off those layers that qualify us as strangers without even speaking a word.  I can only surmise smiling must have been very useful to the prehistoric Aventurina.  If she could come into a neighbor’s cave to seek shelter from the rain and win over agreement with a smile, how much higher her chances of surviving and passing on the gene.

I left Beijing a few weeks ago.  Now I am in the US (and after a few successively larger zoom-ins), Brooklyn Heights, on Henry Street.
 
The neighborhood doesn’t harbor fairy tales, like Venice.  Instead, walking along the eroded pavement and stout brick walls of local churches, I’m constantly reminded, of an old, dignified British man smoking his pipe and drinking his tea in the back of a library smothered in leather-bound books.

 After one month, I am beginning to comfortably settle into a few habits.  I have explored 4 different paths to and from the closest Barnes and Nobles and classified each one according to weather, my clothing and emotional ups and downs.  I have located two supermarkets.  I use the cheapest one for my daily shopping and plan to use the more expensive one on days of celebration.  Finally, I have recorded an alley of clean, large store front windows that offer ample space to run a discreet fashion check-up as I walk past.  I feel like a cat, slowly getting her bearings in a new living-room.

 But life needs more than comforting habits, it needs structure under the form of imperatives.  For most people, those imperatives mainly come down to one thing: money.  I am slowly coaxing my daily activities to fasten around the green glitter of the idea.  The first, because most rapidly implementable, of these activities is webdesign.  In that respect, craigslist can be a blessing as well as a curse.  Companies with extra employees will fodder them to the site, having them write different variations(mainly adding “;” or “@” or the favorite “*” here and there) on one ad theme to drown out the postings of private webdesigners.

The second activity, or aspiration is newspaper and magazine writing.  I hardly dare to pronounce the words “freelance writer.”  Like topology mathematics, they are separated from me by an aura that humns “impossible”, “impossible”, “impossible” on a descending minor scale.  And yet, I decided to dip my toe in the water. 

 Before I did though, I over-prepared myself: a long day at Barnes and Nobles reading self-help books on Freelance writing.  I would recommend Freelance Writer by Moira Anderson Allen.  She offers in depth tips on how to pitch articles along with real examples of follow up emails.  Her writing is catchy and makes you visualize your chances of becoming a freelance writer increasing at the same rate as the pages turn.

At toe’s deep level, everything is going pretty well.  My previous articles for the New York Times arts section rewarded me with a freelance opportunity for the Asia Times (www.atimes.com).  My first feature for them was accepted, it will be up on the site by Friday, and I have received my first assignment from the editor of the China section.  Maybe at the beginning of next week, If I’m in particularly high spirits I’ll try for the big fish of the pond: Time Asia, Newsweek, the Smithsonian.  And maybe if my spirits are particularly high, at the end of the year, I’ll pitch to the New Yorker.  But for the moment, these are big fish in the pond of my wild dreams.

Yesterday, I succumbed to the lure of the Armageddon threats, I registered for Second Life.  The first thing I noticed during the registration process: almost immediately after I received my screen name, the game gave me the option to purchase 250 Linden dollars for a fraction of the same price in dollars (1 us dollar for 280 linden dollars.)  I shied away from that option.  After the registration process was finished, the site prompted me to download a program to tap into the Second Life world. 

Once inside, amazement is served in small chunks of 20 second slight rises in adrenalin blood level.  The first is when you actually start walking, graphics are clunky, but you can make out other people’s silhouettes with their avatar’s names floating on top of them.  There is brilliant green grass, bluish transparent current frozen in the river bed, a wave-less sea and a setting red disk in the sky.    You can even change your appearance with options ranging from anorexic to obese, a puffy right eye to a puffy left eye and an ankle length skirt to a miniskirt that’s missing the whole front part … Another boost of adrenalin (and this one the strongest) when I realized my avatar could fly, and it wasn’t more complicated than holding up the Page up key.

 On the whole, the experience bore the dull sting of comical disappointment.  What I saw of the game during my one hour venture was very much empty.  Yes at the starting point, there is a whole group of people fervently changing their appearance and walking into trees, but as soon as you teleport yourself to Korea or fly across the next-door sea, not a soul in sight.  In their stead, the tacit greeting of empty buildings and space stations.  I almost forgot the scattered army of red empty sports car clones, evidence that many are spending their Linden dollars in useless ways.  I can imagine myself buying a virtual car, driving around with it for ten minutes to show off I actually spent the money, and then getting tired of it and discarding it on the side.

I have spent the last three paragraphs bashing this game, it is therefore my duty to come up with some praise or  constructive criticism.  Let’s roll in the praise:  you can actually make things……..and for free.  An over-simplified 3ds max rip-roff on the top left allows you to create 3-d objects and leave them lying around for people to see.  That’s good, but it is not really encouraged as much as spending money on real estate and red sports car clones.

Second Life has raised a cloud of questions in its trail: Will people go in and never come out?  Another Matrix?  Will there be a One?(maybe not the last one, but still worth thinking about.)  As the game stands, I would only tap in, maybe once a month when I felt a craving for a clunky-graphic flight.  I guess in the near future, graphics will be enhanced, merge with movie quality and then gradually become indistinguishable from what we see around us in everyday life. 

But even then, my feeling is that people wouldn’t forsake their real lives for Second Life.  Why? Because Second Life by then, will have become a clone of real life, rife with the same disappointments, sufferings and stings of loss. Why? Because it is a reduced mirror image of our economy.  Those who have the most Linden dollars, ie, the most us dollars will thrive.  They will buy villas, expensive boats, and islands and they construct their own personalized sports cars.  On the other hand, those who don’t have those Linden dollars will be left out of it, reduced to flying around and salivating in front of one of those red sports cars.  Then there will be hackers, the virtual thieves.  There will be financial risk, overcome or undergone.  Money wasted, money lost.  Second Life does not insulate someone from reality’s lash, it pushes them towards it.  People will soon realize Second Life is unable to perform even the basic functions of a narcotic, that it is still incomparable to closed-systems such as films, drugs and art.  Someday a game might inextricably entangle a human being in its reality, Second Life isn’t it.

Physics room 202 in the Lycee International of Saint Germain en Laye is a nightmare.  Every blazing Friday in June, I sit on the edge of a disorderbly bank of tables, staring out onto the courtyard below.  Younger kids are playing football, their mirthful screeches compressed by the hot summer air.

The teacher is rooted in front of the chalkboard, his lines of thinning hair like plow tracks in a  neat French field (he always keeps a comb in the front pocket of his chemistry robe and unobstructedly passes it through his sparse spouts.  .  .  without a mirror).  He is a civil servant and stands as erect as a totem to the third republic should.

To be truthful, this was a long time ago.  My high school physics classes are a mirage today.  But I remember one of those hot Friday afternoon classes, there was a course on colors.  Aren’t there two color systems: one additive and one subtractive?

It doesn’t really matter.  I’m thinking about the subtractive one now.  Say you take all the colors of the rainbow and paste them one on top of the other.  You get black: colors subtract from one another.

The same with languages.  The Chinese I am learning subtracts from my English and French. Similarly, the French I am trying to catch up on (through perversely enjoyable readings of Michel Houillebecq) cauterizes my English.  Even now as I am writing, I suddenly stop, there is a gap hanging right off the tip of my tongue, a missing word. 

I can feel its invisible presence though.  I can reach and touch its outlines with my thoughts, I can remember how my tongue curled around it in the past and gently let it slide off of my lips.  I used to paste these missing words in the center of sentences, and then read over the result satiated with the wholeness, the easyness with which they fell in, like the last piece of a puzzle.

I don’t think anything else of language has slipped away from me. I synthesize wordless thoughts, associate disparate concepts, everything is prepared inside for sentence format.  It is the formatting that stalls.

Maybe because only the formatting changes from one language to the next.  My job requires me to write short texts in Chinese, either in the context of translation or script analysis.  My workmates read over my attempts.  They probably sigh (not right in front of me, that would be impolite) and then patiently comb through the tangled phrases.

Yes the formatting–the order of the words, the sentence’s fulcrum–is off.  But beyond that a lot of mistakes are easily avoidable. 

The rythm of a Chinese sentence for example; even I can hear when its rythm is off.  It is the same as in English or in French.  In those languages, I read over my sentences to gage the flow.  I know when it is broken by staccatos, by periods and short sentences, and when its contours shrink back into fluidity with adjectives and multi-syllabic nouns.  I avoid repeating words because that creates an island of beat in the paragraph that will inevitably be cut off or inconstant and therefore unpleasant. 

These rules do not change in Chinese.  Therefore I have not lost my sense of rythm, but the ease with which I can construct rythm in a grammatically correct and linguistically coherent fashion.

Before I began servicing a Chinese film production company, I thought that Film Festivals were innocent.  That like art exhibits, they came alone, they attracted their crowds, packed them like sardines in front of the ticket booths and then ended leaving a pile of ripped tickets in their wake.

Film Festivals are not like that,  they come hand in hand with Film Markets.  And these Film Markets nestle in luxurious white walled money temples.  Each production company (the ones that have enough money to afford one of the temple’s white walled rooms) sticks its film posters up on its room’s walls, pull in a two meter wide tv and gets ready to transact large flows of green.  The goal is to sell their films distribution rights to each worldwide country for as high a price as possible.  Individual worldwide buyers come along, sit in the room for 30 or 120 minutes, watch the film clips, decide, bargain prices (as if you were bargaining some 1 dollar piece of clothing in the Beijing markets), hopefully sign contracts.  And that’s how we have Amelie Poulain–or another international film- in the United States.

As for the Berlin Festival, it’s a pain.

Accreditation is received in the cellar of the Martin Groppius Bau building.  One would think after paying 60 bucks it would actually present some advantage.  But no.  Even worse.  Accreditated must stand among a queue of accreditated at 7 30  in the morning for one hour out in the cold until the accreditated ticket booths open and sell out in 20 minutes.

The red carpet walk:  Basically a bunch of photographers, an open air red carpet, film stars and then a thinning crowd (it’s cold, who’s going to stand outside for more then ten minutes? Not me)